


A Galaxy is like a River of Stars

by Delirieuse



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Magic, Alternate Universe - Stargate Atlantis Fusion, Crack Treated Seriously, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 16:53:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9132964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delirieuse/pseuds/Delirieuse
Summary: As I found out later, America never had any intention of Britain being part of the Stargate program. It had just happened, after a hastily canned episode of Time Team found a buried Gate in the middle of an otherwise very unimpressive stone circle in Oxfordshire.In another universe, Peter Grant is a probationary constable for the Thames Valley police. He has a straightforward (if unusual) assignment to deliver a Professor Thomas Nightingale to a new posting in Buckinghamshire when his life's genre takes a sudden left turn from 'police procedural' to 'science fiction'.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to [sixthlight](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight), who has been kind enough to beta the first two chapters, and who I pray will not get bored or die of old age before I can deliver the next. And who, not coincidentally, has written some of my absolute favourite RoL fics.

As I found out later, America never had any intention of Britain being part of the Stargate program. It had just happened, after a hastily canned episode of Time Team found a buried Gate in the middle of an otherwise very unimpressive stone circle in Oxfordshire. The thing about stone circles is that everyone pictures Stonehenge, but most of them, the Gatemarker included, are just … rocks. That someone dragged into a rough circle. I’d been to this one once, when I’d dated a Canadian uni student who wanted to see all that Oxfordshire had to offer. Frankly, I’m not sure it can still be called a circle when there’s only about six of the original stones still there, and you have to look at the sketch on the information plaque to get any sense of the rocks having been put somewhere deliberately. Also, when we went it rained the whole time, the local pub which brewed its own beer was closed for renovations, and the Canadian student dumped me within the week.

After the Gate was uncovered, they moved it to Milton Keynes to keep it under wraps, because who goes to Milton Keynes? They stuck it in the basement of the Physics building at the Open University, which is probably one of the only universities in the world to have nearly no students on campus. Besides, Milton Keynes is just a short bus trip away from both Cambridge and Oxford on the X5 bus, making it convenient for any visiting academics who had been rapidly sworn in to Britain’s first chance at the big time since its hundreds of years of colonialism slipped through their fingers after the world wars.

However, if you’re the nobbiest of nobs and coming from Oxford to take up your position as head of our newest secret organisation, you get a Thames Valley Police constable. A constable who has been given the job of driving the 130-mile round trip because he’s on serious probation following the accidental hijacking of an ambulance that could have have happened to anyone and was definitely the smartest thing to do at the time.

Escorting an academic wasn’t exactly what I imagined my future career to be when I started at Sulhamstead. But on the plus side, neither was I in wellies tramping through a field in the vicinity of Wantage at 6am, investigating the tenth such place to contain mysteriously murdered cows in the past week, so it could be worse.

I didn’t mind the drive so much. I quite like cars, and I happened to know, courtesy of Purdy in Traffic, that Dr Nightingale had one of the most beautiful cars I’d ever seen - a Mark 2 Jag. I might’ve resented the early start a bit, and the fact that although we were well into March my car was rimed with frost. Still, I made sure to get to Nightingale’s fifteen minutes early, partly because it never hurts to give a good impression to someone who is clearly important (even if your superiors were so vague when describing him that I’d half wondered if he was going to be a James-Bond-type spy, or a Harry-Potter-style wizard), but mostly because I couldn’t stop hoping that Nightingale would decide that a police car was beneath him and let me drive the Jag instead.

I’m not at my best first thing in the morning. I’d be the first to admit that. But there was something that seemed deeply wrong about the woman who answered the door. She was small and slight, with long straight black hair. She was pale to the point of looking almost sickly, underneath what even I could tell was makeup. She also had these two scars, one to each cheek, that looked like she’d been glassed in a bar fight. Not a Glasgow smile, just a pair of short grooves just underneath her cheekbones. She was dressed in all black: black frilly blouse under a severe black skirt suit, black stockings, black court shoes. I guess she figured that once you’re that odd looking, it makes sense to embrace it.

She didn’t stay anything, just looked at me. After slightly too long a pause, I ventured, ‘Er, I’m looking for Dr Nightingale?’

The woman in black made no sign that she’d heard me. She made no facial expression at all. Just closed the door.

So that could’ve gone better.

I pulled out my phone and was trying to get the mail app to behave to see if I had Dr Nightingale’s number, when the door opened.

‘Ah, Peter, is it? Peter Grant? Thomas Nightingale.’ He put his hand out and I shook it automatically.

About the only thing that I’d imagined correctly about Doctor Thomas Nightingale was that he was white. He definitely wasn't a Dumbledore-type wizard - too young for a start, and no trust-my-bad-decisions-they’re-best-for-you white beard. Nor was he particularly James Bondy, even if he was about the same age as Daniel Craig. For a start, although he was wearing a suit - a very nice suit - it wasn’t a tuxedo, but rather a tailored grey pinstripe. Although was clean-shaven, he had an old-school RP accent and the sort of bearing to suggest that in a movie of his life he ought to be played by David Niven. He was tall, with grey eyes and brown hair. However, for the one tick in the ‘wizard’ column, he was carrying a silver-topped cane, which did give him a slight Lucius-Malfoy edge.

Unfortunately, it rapidly became clear that not only I was not going to be driving the Jag, but the gothic-lolita-from-hell was also coming with us.

‘This is Molly,’ said Nightingale. ‘She’s my personal secretary.’ He didn’t seem to be the type to have a personal assistant. Well, he didn’t seem to be the type to have a personal assistant who wasn’t a smug young man half his age called Julian.

Nightingale opened the car door for her and Molly slid gracefully onto the back seat of the Ford like Rita Hayworth or some silent film actress. It was a jarringly old-fashioned scene to play out with a car that had a drunk throwing up on the upholstery a week previously.

Once Nightingale was settled in the front seat, he opened his briefcase and immersed himself in reading whatever briefing material you’re given before taking over a secret scientific organisation that doesn’t officially exist. Not that I knew about the Stargate program at the time, of course. All I knew was I was ferrying some academic to Milton Keynes, which wasn’t one of my usual job duties. Playing chauffeur is a long way from breaking up a fight outside the Half Moon or speed camera duties on the Abingdon Road.

If you’re wondering how awkward it might be to drive two hours with a disconcertingly dapper stranger in the front seat of your car while his silent personal assistant sits in the back occasionally meeting your eyes and promising death with her stare, well. I can probably safely say that it was even more awkward than you imagined.

*

After we arrived at the Open University, having spent forty-five minutes in the snarled knot that is the Milton Keynes grid of roads and roundabouts, I think I can safely say that there is probably nowhere better to keep a top-secret lab. Even if someone tumbles to its existence and tries to infiltrate it there’s no way they’d get through those roundabouts with sanity intact. I don’t care if they say that the Milton Keynes grid is ‘rational’ and ‘straightforward’. Every roundabout looks the same and there’s grass and neat rows of trees between you and all the landmarks so that you can’t tell where you are. I’m still not certain whether we got lost on the way or not. And then there’s the Open University itself: a collection of modern buildings so aggressively mundane that they look like an overgrown economics college rather than the repository of secret alien tech.

By the time I parked the car, I’d decided to see if I could find out what the whole tooth-grinding experience was in aid of. The thing about being a copper is that if you’re wearing your Serious Face people usually assume that you’re meant to be wherever it is you are. It’s like having your own Someone Else’s Problem field. So all I had to do was follow Nightingale and Molly while wearing both my Official Police Liaison face and my uniform, and I figured I was in.

Nightingale lead the way, waving his ID card at the sensors by every other door, and holding the door open as he walked through so Molly and I weren’t left behind. He’d clearly been here before: the photo on his ID card was worn, and he didn’t pause once as he led us through the campus.

But at the final red door in the Physics building basement he paused, ID card hovering near the reader. He turned to me and fixed me with a look.

“If you happen to follow me in,” he said. “You aren’t to discuss this with anyone else, understand? You haven’t been here, and haven’t seen anything.”

He watched me with those gimlet eyes until I blurted, “Yes, sir. Understood.”

At this point I would probably have cheerfully donated my left arm to science if it meant I could get a look beyond that door. If you’ve watched any telly or movies ever, you know that being sworn to secrecy guarantees that something exciting will happen. No-one’s ever sworn to secrecy and then shown laser microscopy of banana cells.

“Very well,” Nightingale said, and turned away to swipe us all in.

If I had to give you a pithy way of describing the lab it would be this: Doctor Who original series meets New Who. It had that patched-together repurposed charm of Classic Who, and though it had more shiny lights and less tinfoil and cardboard, Stargate UK clearly didn’t have the same budget as New Who, even the Russell T. Davies era.

“Wait here,” said Nightingale in that cut-glass accent of his. “And don’t touch anything.”

Have you ever had those moments when you know doing something isn’t smart, isn’t what you intend to do, and then you have to watch yourself, almost like an out-of-body experience, do exactly that thing?

There was this enormous black chair, almost like a throne. It really did seem incredibly alien: it looked like a mad scientist had tried to meld a silver-dipped bird skeleton with the corpse of a tree and given up halfway through. But there was something about it that drew me nearer. I noticed, vaguely, in the way you do when you’re in a dream, that it was on some sort of pedestal, and there were cables connected to it.

In the background I could hear Nightingale and some tall ginger man talking intently with some severe-looking white guy with ‘army officer’ stencilled on him as clearly as if he were a crate. I overheard them muttering about ‘Little Crocodiles’ and something that I’m not sure I heard correctly but which sounded like them saying that they needed to ‘move the project along’. But over that I could hear distant music - disconnected snatches of drum, cymbal and trumpet. The music got louder and clearer as I approached the alien chair. The sensible part of my brain, noticing that I was going to sit down regardless, justified it by reasoning that sitting down out of the way was probably a good way of keeping out of trouble while I waited for Nightingale.

The very moment I sat down the music seemed to come together, like pieces clicking into place. I thought, _John Coltrane_ , then _A Love Supreme_ , and then _Dad’s going to be insufferable when he finds out the music of the spheres is jazz_ and the universe unfolded above the chair in little lights of blue.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to everyone who left a comment or kudos on the first chapter! It means a lot to me.  
> Happily I got work done on chapter three this week, but then that went out the door when I got sick. So ... please subscribe here if you'd like to see more because I can't promise that the next chapter'll be up in a week. :/  
> And again, thanks to [Sixthlight](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight) for the beta, and for reigning in my ridiculousness. Any remaining weirdnesses are almost certainly because I didn't listen.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been watching and reading science fiction since I was young enough not to know better. I did my time – Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Zelazny, Herbert, even Robert Anton Wilson – and yes, Robert Aspirin. I knew that there were two explanations of what had just happened: magic, or sci-fi type science. And I hadn’t said any pseudo-Latin.

And so I was feeling somewhat put out that all the great sci-fi writers had left out the boring bits. It turns out that if you accidentally activate alien tech you aren’t even meant to even know exists, you don’t get inducted into the vast and unknowable mysteries of the universe. You get left behind in a corner while tight-lipped researchers and frighteningly serious-looking Royal Marines have intense discussions involving the Official Secrets Act, and whether it’s possible to for a lowly constable to have a security clearance. I hadn’t known that I could be so bored and so excited at the same time.

I think most of us have a few moments in our lives that we can point to and say ‘that’s when my life changed’. Meeting your wife or husband for the first time, your mother getting cancer, finding out you got that university place you wanted, breaking up with your first girlfriend, divorce. I stood there waiting for them to decide, for the shoe to fall, and I knew that even if I was packed off back to Oxford that I’d have to be an idiot not to add this moment, the moment when I’d really seen the universe for the first time, onto my list of life-changing moments. It was a short list. It only had two items.

The previous moment on my list goes a long way to explaining why although I was feeling light-headed with exhilaration it was tinged, just at the edges, with anticipatory dread that I was going to have to tell my mother.

You might be forgiven for thinking that graduating from the White House, Thames Valley Police’s training centre, would have been a turning point. But honestly, becoming a copper is one of those things that I just seemed to drift into. My original plan was to become an architect, but as it turns out you still have to be able to draw, even in this modern age, where I understand that this invention called ‘computers’ will take off any day now.

The first moment that really changed my life happened when I was twelve, and I got to discover that my dad was a junkie by finding him mostly dead of a heroin overdose on the living room floor. The next few weeks were a confusion of misery that I still don’t like thinking about, where I worried about whether or not my dad was going to be okay while being babysat by most of my mum’s friends and relatives in turn - at least those of them who lived nearby.

The upshot of all this was that my mum got him mostly clean - you can be a ‘recovered addict’ but you’ll always be an addict - through sheer willpower, and moved us to the wilds of Oxfordshire, because she thought that getting Dad out of London would help. She picked Oxfordshire because a Aunty Marai, friend of a friend who owned a small cleaning business, was looking for extra hands, and was willing to put us up while we found somewhere to live.

Honestly, Mum wasn’t wrong about getting Dad out of London. By the time I graduated Dad had started playing again; not trumpet, his embouchure was ruined by then. But Mum got him onto keyboard - I think by complaining about the organist at her latest church - and he wound up in some small-time jazz band, playing the pubs of Oxford and Reading.

I’m not saying it was all beer and skittles. Dad was happy, and so Mum was happy, especially since she’d also largely taken charge of the Oxford West African community, such as it was. But for me, we’d moved from Kentish Town, London, a multicultural haven where I had six of my mum’s friends and relations in our tower block alone, to Wantage, Oxfordshire, 90% white British, when any day that none of my classmates at King Alfred brought a knife to school was a good day.

I finished high school with three things: a calm demeanour when threatened with violence that stood me in excellent as a probationary constable when the pubs shut; an urgent need to leave Wantage by any means possible; and a healthy appreciation for my mother’s ability to bend the world to her will.

 One of the marines wandered over to keep me company. She wore a forest-green hijab instead of a beret and was, I think, the first person to have actually smiled at me that day.

‘Sahra Guleed,’ she said. ‘Well done on breaking into a secret lab and pissing off everyone in it in under five minutes.’

‘Peter Grant,’ I said. ‘And technically, I _didn’t_ break in. I was escorting Dr Nightingale.’

‘Uh huh. Of course. Escorting him.’

‘In my police car,’ I pointed out, mostly to try to stop Guleed’s insinuating eyebrows.

‘Just checking,’ she said, ‘but does your door-to-door service mean you can somehow get your car through multiple corridors and into basements?’

‘That would be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I was just … making sure that nothing happened to him on the walk.’

‘Peter. It’s a good thing you’re a copper, because that’s possibly the dodgiest thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘You know what’s going on over there?’ I asked, indicating the hush-hush hushed huddle.

‘Well, Seawoll - that’s Lieutenant Colonel Seawoll to you - says that you should be strung up by your heels, but Nightingale says that we need you - don’t get a big head - and Dr Walid says—’ She adopted a heavy Scots accent. ‘“You’re no’ getting me back in tha’ thing” - they put him in the chair and he threw up, like proper spewing, which was impressive because he’s an army doctor. So the good money’s on everything being sorted by lunchtime. I mean, during the Second World War they got women to sign the Official Secrets Act, so I’m sure they can see themselves right to taking a copper.’

She was right, too. Once they stopped arguing and a few phone calls were made, Seawoll gave me a potted history of the Stargate Program looking like he had accidentally bitten into a lemon when he was expecting a clementine and was trying not to let it show on his face. And he kept pausing midsentence to glare at Nightingale. Dr Nightingale, for his part, would interrupt to explain things when he didn’t need to, and looked more smug every time he caught Seawoll’s eye.

Afterwards, Lt Col Seawoll went off to shout at people a bit more, and Dr Nightingale and Dr Walid took themselves aside to point excitedly at iPads and string together more multisyllable words than really seemed necessary, so Guleed took me over to the staff canteen for lunch. It dawned on me on the walk that the other thing that science fiction had entirely left out was the bit after the Call to Adventure when Our Hero had to go home and try to explain it all to his mum. While not breaching the Official Secrets Act. Because once things had been explained to me - that Atlantis was in another galaxy, not just a myth; that Nightingale and his team had been trying to find its location; that using the Stargate we could _go there_ \- there was _no way_ I was not going. I mean, proper aliens and travelling to far-off worlds and sleeping under alien skies. There was, after all, a sonic screwdriver on my childhood bookshelf. This was as close as I was ever going to get to walking into a Tardis.

I am not a good liar, particularly to my mum. You’d think I’d be better at it by now, with all the chances I’d had to practice. Like my attempt to skip out on my second cousin’s fiftieth birthday so I could go to the Year Six disco, or the embarrassing thing when I was fourteen with the bike pump and the custard-filled balloon - although in my own defence I hadn’t even opened my mouth with that one and my mum knew exactly what had happened, which was a little uncanny, frankly.

Luckily for me, Guleed let me practise on her until I was basically word perfect on explaining my new ‘diplomatic assignment’. If Guleed ever decides she wants kids, God help them, because Guleed was surprisingly good at playing the part of an African matriarch. She said she’s had lots of practical experience, because her mother raised five daughters by herself in a foreign country, and if it was one thing she hoped to inherit from her mother it was her amazing psychic powers at knowing, for example, which of the kids had put the empty milk bottle back in the fridge.

‘Oh,’ she added, ‘and her ability to find a park, even in central London.’

‘You’re having me on,’ I said. ‘Alien tech I can believe, now that I’ve sat on it. But not parking spaces in London.’

‘Come and visit when we get back, then call me a liar. Mum says it’s compensation for not getting to race dirt bikes like she wanted when she was small.’

As Guleed and I grinned at each other over our lunches I realised that this was real, I was _doing this_. Fuck me, I thought. I’m going to another galaxy.

**Author's Note:**

> All remarks about Milton Keynes and the Open University drawn from life, although I'm quite fond of its grid system.  
> (I only have one more chapter of this written so far. If you feel like leaving kudos or a quick note, I would appreciate it very much! My sincere hope is to get more written soon, but I warn you that I am glacially slow, so [following me on tumblr](http://delirieuse.tumblr.com) or subscribing might be your best bet if this wets your whistle & you'd like to read more! Next chapter coming soon.)


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